


battlefields and riverbanks

by crickets



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-26
Updated: 2011-03-26
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:15:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets





	battlefields and riverbanks

**ONE**.  
Stefan lights the match that burns the Salvatore boarding house to the ground. Caroline stands beside him and holds his hand.

 _Side-by-side, they watch it burn._

 **TWO**.  
They bury Tyler together.

Neither of them were there when it happened, and they both curse themselves for finding his body cold, the telling spray of blood across his face.

"He was all alone," is all Caroline can say, placing a bouquet over the mound of fresh dirt -- wolfsbane and vervain bound together.

"Everybody's alone, Caroline," Stefan tells her, taking her into his arms. And even as he says it, Caroline doesn't really believe it. She closes her eyes and doesn't let go of him for a very long time.

 

 **THREE**.  
 _Caroline kisses him first._

It's been decades, and they're in the middle of a holy supernatural war, and though their colors reveal that they're on different sides, Caroline had thought he was dead.

Both of their faces are marred with dirt and blood, and both of their hearts are heavy with the knowledge that they've been played, like hundreds of thousands of soldiers before them in every war since the beginning of time. Stefan drops the gun he's holding to the ground, the one filled with wood-tipped bullets, and it lands with a thud on the wet, solid earth at his feet.

 _He never picks it up again._

 

 **FOUR**.  
They like to pretend that they don't know each other. After the wave of knowledge spreads across the world, the earth's religions find some way of covering it up again. Destruction has a very useful way of covering up the truth, and pretty soon there's no one left alive who remembers it. In times like these, their immortality once again becomes something they have to hide.

So they pick a place, a town, somewhere they haven't been before, sometimes even a place that they have. They arrive separately, make friends, start separate lives. Stefan even gets married once, _to pass the time_.

He fucks Caroline in the back seat of his family car, his wife and step-children sleeping at home.

She takes no care in trying not to mark him, make him bruise, make him bleed.

 _Secretly, even though she knows that he is hers entirely, she wishes he wouldn't heal._

 

 **FIVE**.  
Stefan kisses her last.

She's in his arms and dying -- the doing of a Lockwood descendant come back to remind them of their past, to seek revenge for some long-buried grudge.

Stefan carries her out to the riverbank and throws both of their rings to the bottom.

"No, Stefan, don't," Caroline pleads with him weakly.

"I've lived a long life," Stefan tells her, brushes back her hair with his thumb. " _We've_ lived a long life." He kisses her then, presses his lips to hers, and waits for day.

 _-fin_


End file.
